[snip]
Anne's approach, basically a symlink farm, is not a very good idea--
remember that most windows FTP clients don't handle symlinks properly.

Well, I think before we do any big-think, we need to decide what is and
isn't OK in terms of links. I thought the consensus that the links were
not a problem. More hazily, I think the idea was to use hard links for the
servers and symlinks for the CD's. I don't have any particular expertise
in this. I will vouch for the fact that windows ftp clients often screw up
symlinks, having recently tried a smattering of them on the debian archive.

It might also be useful to tie the discussion to the larger use-case in
which we see things embedded. Anne and I have mostly been thinking of one
in which a user comes in over the internet, downloads the minimum necessary
images to boot the system, and tries to do everything else off the
network/Hard disk/etc. Other cases that would, I think, be very similar,
are someone with a CD-ROM drive they can't boot from, or someone doing a
bunch of local network installs.

We all agree a newbie booting off the CD-ROM without any worries is the
best case; they won't care what the directory structure is.

The ugly, but perhaps easier to explain, scenario is someone who comes in
and makes a full set of floppies.

Furthermore, I reiterate that it's not possible to compare the scheme
if it hasn't been worked through for other arechitectures.

Having looked at the directory structure for other architectures, I don't
see what the problem is. For the other architectures, we simply add the
subarch to the path (as we do now). Is your concern duplication of files,
or is there some other issue I've overlooked? Since I haven't used other
architectures, it's certainly possible.

Newbies should use CD-ROM installation -- I'm hoping install from
Official CDROMs is a total straight shot. In fact, one feature which
is not there yet but should be is for dbootstrap to auto-sense
official CD-ROMs.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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